Gifting the other, or why are nineteenth-century German bourgeois men acting like Trobriand Islanders?

Taking its lead from analyses of gift exchange by Marcel Mauss and Marshall Sahlins as well as of contact by Charles Long and Jonathan Z Smith, this article elaborates a theory of the exchange, among dominant social subjects, of representations of their subjected proximate others in order to rectify...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Critical research on religion
Main Author: Geller, Jay 1953- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Sage [2013]
In: Critical research on religion
Further subjects:B Women
B gift exchange
B Representation
B G W F Hegel
B Contact
B other(s)
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Description
Summary:Taking its lead from analyses of gift exchange by Marcel Mauss and Marshall Sahlins as well as of contact by Charles Long and Jonathan Z Smith, this article elaborates a theory of the exchange, among dominant social subjects, of representations of their subjected proximate others in order to rectify the crisis precipitated by contact with otherness that threatens their claims to autonomy, authority, homogeneity, and universality. Specifically it situates the polemical exchange of representations of women among Friedrich Schlegel (Lucinde/Lucinde), G W F Hegel (Antigone/Phenomenology of Spirit), and Karl Gutzkow (Wally/Wally the Skeptic) as exemplary German male bourgeois efforts to rectify the crises to subject formation generated, in part, by the emergence of gender-coded bifurcated bourgeois society and signaled by the Kantian and French Revolutions. The public dissemination of apotropaic representations screened the dependence upon proximate others by, and determined the positions among, exchange participants as well as maintained structures of domination.
ISSN:2050-3040
Contains:Enthalten in: Critical research on religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1177/2050303213506474